Automated Detection of Pulmonary Nodules in Chest Radiography Using Template Matching

단순흉부영상의 Template-Matching을 이용한 폐 결절 자동 추출

This paper proposes some technical approaches for automatic detection of pulmonary nodules in chest X-ray images. We applied threshold technique for the lung field segmentation and extended the lung field by using morphological methods. A template matching technique was employed for automatic detecting nodules in lung area. Genetic algorithm(GA) was used in template matching(TM) to select a matched image from various reference patterns(simulated typical nodules). We eliminated the false-positive candidates by using histograms and contrasts. We used standard databases published by Japanese Society of Radiological Technology (JSRT) for correct results. Also we employ two-dimensional Gaussian distribution for some reference images because the shadow of lung nodules in radiogram generally shows the distributions. Nodules of about 89% were correctly detected by our scheme. The simulation results show that it is an effective method to indicate lesions on chest radiograms.